Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide, self harm, and sexual violence.
At first glance, Jessica Wallowingbull and Yad Duu Quay Mark Cook Jr. appeared to have had little in common except their attempts to survive. She was Eastern Shoshone, a nation of peoples from what is now called Wyoming and the Great Basin that stretches into Utah and Idaho. His heritage was Tlingit and Haida, nations based along the Pacific Northwest coast, in what is now Alaska and British Columbia, respectively.
Upon closer examination, however, Wallowingbull and Cook shared much—both with each other and countless other Indigenous and First Nations peoples in North America. The case can be made that the crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration was embodied in their short lives which ended in suicide.
Native American and Alaska Native (NA/AN) persons in state or federal prison are incarcerated at a per capita rate of 801 per 100,000—second only to Black people, according to the most recent complete figures available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The increase in the incarceration rate of Indigenous peoples from 2021 to 2022 was the highest among all the ethnic and racial groups.
It is likely that this rate is higher than reported, as prisons and jails often categorize people according to single “races”—though many have ethnic and racial backgrounds that don’t fit into one checkbox. Some jail and prison staff are allowed to make ethnic determinations themselves, oblivious to the sheer diversity of Indigenous peoples.
A November 2024 report from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) in collaboration with the Jail Data Initiative found that Indigenous people are also most likely to be jailed multiple times compared to any other ethnic group. A total of 33 percent of NA/AN people arrested and booked into jail were booked twice or more in a twelve-month span compared to 23 percent of white people and 20 percent of Black people.
Tribal jails have grown rapidly because of new construction projects and incarcerated persons within the past two decades. Indian Country jails, as they are commonly known, can incarcerate a person for up to three years for misdemeanor crimes and some violent crimes including domestic abuse. They also incarcerate NA/AN persons who cannot afford bail. It is widely understood in Indian Country that tribal jails are riddled with neglect, abuse, understaffing, and poor living conditions.
“One of the worst incarceration trends in the United States is the boom in jail construction, including tribal and [local] jails,” says Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for PPI. “The idea is sold as alleviating overcrowding, but what we’ve seen is that if they build it, they will fill it.”
The recent BJS Indian Jails report revealed that eighty tribal jails admitted nearly 6,000 persons in June 2023 alone. More than half of men and women in tribal jails have not been convicted and nearly two-thirds are charged with nonviolent offenses (63 percent). From 2013 to 2023, inmates held for drug-related offenses increased from just 4 percent to 11 percent.
Bertram emphasizes that the growth in tribal jail populations is driven by increasing numbers of incarcerated women and people aged fifty-five and older. Many alleged crimes are related to substance use disorders.
“Data suggests that Native women are being charged with property crimes and drug and alcohol [offenses]. These are crimes for which poverty, racism and marginalization play huge factors,” she says. “When we talk about older people, we are talking about people who are falling through the cracks of the social service system.”
Incarceration of any kind can prove deadly for older people as it offers virtually no health care and has a “totally destabilizing impact on people’s lives for no social benefit whatsoever,” Bertram explains.
Because of complex jurisdictional issues regarding crimes committed in tribal jurisdictions, law enforcement authorities there will often let non-Native suspects go without arresting them, even in cases of rape. One in three NA/AN women are raped at some point in their lifetime, and more than half of Indigenous women will experience sexual violence.
One alarming obstacle to solving sexually violent crimes against Indigenous women, as well as the countless disappearances and homicides, is the fact that many reservations house up to thousands of non-Native men in “man camps.” These camps house workers earning high incomes in industries like mining, oil and gas, construction, and more. Research has shown that man camps have had a serious negative impact on Indigenous women’s safety.
Though federal and state governments purport to support Indigenous sovereignty, U.S. law often trumps self-determination where arrest, prosecution, and sentencing are concerned.
Indeed, no other ethnic group in the United States is subject to the maddeningly complex jurisdictional regulations mandating who can arrest whom, and where convicted persons are sent to do time. Essentially, with the exception of relatively minor crimes, all alleged crimes committed by NA/AN people in Indian Country against non-Natives are immediately referred to the federal or state prosecutorial system, which usually guarantees heavier sentences.
Alleged crimes committed by NA/AN people within Indian Country against people from the same tribe are also often referred to federal prosecution. This was the case with Jessica Wallowingbull, who was originally threatened with a twenty-year federal sentence despite having a history of mental illness and being a victim of domestic violence.
Pregnant with her second child, Wallowingbull was a battered woman grappling with drug and alcohol abuse to dull the pain of a chronic mental illness when she was arrested in April 2022, according to her family. She was sentenced to three years and nine months in federal prison for injuring a boyfriend who beat her regularly in public, according to Wallowingbull’s great aunt Linda Tillman. Most of Wallowingbull’s family resides on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
Although the Wind River Reservation has a tribal jail—as well as a psychiatric facility—where Wallowingbull could have been held to be closer to family as well as the federal Wyoming court where she was eventually tried and sentenced, she was transferred by the U.S. Marshals Service to a remote county jail in Nebraska.
That distance meant a six-hour drive for the family who came to retrieve Wallowingbull’s infant from a hospital near the jail. The family members were denied their request to see Wallowingbull as she was immediately separated from her newborn daughter, Faithfulee My Wallowingbull.
“The baby was alone and covered in feces,” Tillman explains in horror. “We never saw [Jessica] again after she was arrested . . . until the prison shipped us her body for a proper burial.”
As a young person, Wallowingbull spent time in the foster care system and eventually lost both her biological parents to chronic health conditions. While on the outside, she took psychotropic medication but it is unclear if it was continued while she was at FCI Waseca, a federal women’s prison in Southern Minnesota.
FCI Waseca was the target of a 2023 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigation into endemic problems at the prison, but severe Constitutional violations are still taking place.
Twinn Wrice, a trans man who has served sixteen years in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, was on hand to take a picture when Wallowingbull received her GED in a prison graduation ceremony. Wrice offered his hand and smiled, congratulating Wallowingbull. Wallowingbull hesitated for a moment, then extended her hand and grinned.
“She may have had her issues with mental illness but she was functional here. To others she may have looked like weak prey. But I was proud of her,” Wrice says. “There is so much darkness in this place, [so] to see her in cap and gown that day I snapped her picture was wonderful. She was a ray of hope for her family’s future.”
Wallowingbull spoke to Wrice of her two children and how excited she was that the BOP was going to release her to a halfway house by April 2024. She largely kept to herself and kept busy with elaborate beading projects. She also helped to organize Native ceremonies. Still, the trauma of being off the Wind River Reservation, in a hostile, chaotic, and drug-ridden environment, was too much for her to bear. Her extended family and two daughters were 900 miles away.
Things looked hopeful, Wrice says, until the prison’s out-of-control drug epidemic got a hold of Wallowingbull. Within weeks, she went from a quiet and sweet young woman to a desperate woman on the verge of a complete breakdown.
What Tillman and the rest of the family didn’t know is that Wallowingbull had started to use “strips” (prison slang for smokable, chemically soaked paper) as a coping mechanism to escape her psychological suffering. Interviews with multiple people imprisoned at FCI Waseca estimate that more than 90 percent of women held there are using strips either habitually or recreationally. At this prison, strips are a potentially deadly neurotoxic combination of oven cleaner, roach spray, and other forms of insecticides, all of which impact the central nervous system. Although they cost cents to produce, they are sold at an enormous mark-up.
Soon, Wallowingbull suffered from paranoia, depression, delusions, seizures, loss of consciousness, and aggression. More than a dozen Waseca inmates, including Wrice, describe the behavior of people high on strips as “demonic.”
According to friends and observers inside, Wallowingbull, who had a history of self harm, was cutting herself with more frequency, and she ended up in suicide watch at least five times. Others imprisoned at FCI Waseca say Wallowingbull only owed about $50 to the dealers. But when she was found to have committed a minor infraction, she was cut off from access to her commissary, which is often how dealers are paid. The ensuing weeks were terrifying. Wrice says that Wallowingbull was “tortured” by the dealers. She was bitten, beaten with locks wrapped in socks, and kicked and punched until she urinated on herself.
On Sunday, February 4, 2024, Wallowingbull had what other prisoners present said looked like a psychotic break in the cafeteria. Fellow inmates claim that instead of alerting the medical staff, FCI Waseca guards wheeled her back to her cell and left her alone. Wallowingbull then ended her life.
In an adjacent cell, two women who were smoking strips heard a loud thud, but were so high that they waited until they were able to stand and walk to go look at what had made the noise. They found Wallowingbull’s body, beyond resuscitation.
FCI Waseca then informed Wallowingbull’s family that her body would be cremated—an overstep of their authority. People who die in prison are only buried or cremated by the institution if no next of kin is available, or if the family has no money to handle post-mortem rituals. Eastern Shoshone tradition requires a burial in addition to a ceremony in which all the possessions of the deceased are burned, to help ease the transition to the next plane of existence without earthly attachments. Wallowingbull’s family asserted their rights and, secured her body for a traditional burial back on the Wind River Reservation.When Wallowingbull’s body arrived, an elder who was dressing her deceased body for the ceremony noticed that her body was covered in cuts and lacerations.
One month later, another Indigenous woman imprisoned at FCI Waseca tried to kill herself, according to others imprisoned in the facility. Wrice was incredulous when a prison guard remarked that FCI Waseca “was beginning to look like an Indian burial ground.”
When prison systems send Native peoples to distant locations far away from their communities, they fail to take into account precisely how interdependent Indigenous communities and families tend to be and how easily social isolation can lead to suicide. In federal prisons, NA/AN people have the highest rate of suicide of any demographic group, at seventy-seven per 100,000, according to the BJS.
A history of colonization has left Indigenous communities across the United States facing massive unaddressed intergenerational trauma—a root cause of the high suicide rate among them. The symptoms—poverty, drug abuse—were evident in Jessica Wallowingbull’s life, and in the life of Yad Duu Quay Mark Cook Jr.
Artistically gifted and sensitive, Cook was mistreated in early childhood by repressive institutions, including a period of forced psychiatric commitment in Texas on the word of a “racist school and the office of children’s services,” explains Thomas Abel, Cook’s grandfather. A member of the Haida Nation, Abel lives with his wife Ernestine Hanlon-Abel in her Tlingit village in Hoonah, Alaska.
“The white man still controls everything,” he says unequivocally. “We don’t have sovereignty at all.”
Abel had flown down to Seattle when Cook was only eighteen months old, after his daughter had called to say that she could no longer take care of her baby because of her drug addiction. When he was in high school, Cook began to use heroin, unbeknownst to his grandparents. Still, he remained very close to his Tlingit community as a remarkable dancer and self-taught guitarist, says Abel, a longtime activist for Alaska Native rights. Later, Cook was sent to juvenile detention, where, Abel says, he was stripped of all his clothes and made to sit in a cell alone and stare at a dot on the wall for hours on end. Despite his struggles, Cook showered his grandparents—who raised him as their child—with unconditional love.
“Mark was my best friend,” Abel says.
A severe back injury changed the course of Cook’s young adult life, as psychic pain combined with unrelenting chronic pain. Cook was arrested after a visit to the Indian Health Service clinic for his acute back pain went awry.
Though Cook was barely able to walk, he was ignored. In a moment of hopelessness and frustration, Cook raised his voice, threatening to sue the clinic. The next day, he was arrested on two counts of trespassing and property damage, then taken to a state prison, Lemon Creek Correctional Center, in Juneau. The sheer distance from Hoonah meant that his family was unable to visit. Alaska’s criminal justice system is unique in that people can be incarcerated in large state prisons even if they have not been convicted of any crime.
According to Abel, Cook was subjected to solitary confinement despite not having committed any infraction. Abel contends that the prison staff put him in solitary because of his back pain disability, perhaps as a way of avoiding having to help him. Cook spent many weeks in solitary confinement suffering in agony, denied medical treatment.
Cook spoke on the phone to relatives telling how he would try to sit on the toilet and then collapse to the floor of his cell, covered in his own excrement and urine for hours before staff showed up. After enduring this for three weeks, on April 22, 2023, Cook placed tape over the camera in his cell and killed himself.
Though Cook was technically dead, he was registered as an organ donor and remained on life support. A traditional Tlingit ceremony was later held for him in Hoonah.
In September 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska announced that they were suing on behalf of the families of two young men who died by suicide in state prison, including Cook.
Tragically, Cook’s mother died of a drug overdose in Seattle shortly after her son’s death, and Cook’s father, Mark Cook Sr., died from complications of alcoholism in mid-November 2024.
“Intergenerational trauma is such a significant part of all this tragedy,” Abel says forthrightly. “Ours is a racist legal system.”
“You killed my grandson!” Abel recalls saying in outrage over the phone to the superintendent of Lemon Creek. “I land this right at your feet. I am going to hold you accountable.”
FCI Waseca and Bureau of Prisons representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this article by press time.
